Excellent Typesetting, Part 3
February 9, 2005 – 12:00 pmLast week I promised to show you how to convert a Word document into LaTeX for the purpose of achieving excellent, automated typesetting. What’s LaTeX? In brief, here’s the story:
Back in the 1970s, Dr. Donald Knuth created a highly sophisticated (and difficult to use) typesetting program for the second edition of his series of books “The Art of Computer Programming.” He named his program “TeX”, an abbreviation of the Greek word “technê,” meaning “art” and “craft”:
The “X” represents a Greek chi and is not pronounced as in “Howdy, Tex,” but rather as a voiceless velar fricative (as in the Scottish “Loch”) so that “TeX” rhymes with “blechhh.” (Hey, that linguistics class wasn’t a total loss after all!) Knuth is a Very Interesting Person, and you can learn more about him here:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/
Using great foresight, Knuth designed his program so that others could create macros that tell it how to work. These macros are analogous to those used in Microsoft Word, and a TeX macro “package” is analogous to a Microsoft Word add-in.
One of those packages in particular makes working with TeX much easier. It was created by Leslie Lamport in the 1980s and is thus “Lamport’s TeX package,” or “LaTeX” for short.
Another major macro package for Tex is ConTeXt, created by PRAGMA-ADE:
“If these programs were created so long ago,” you may be asking, “aren’t they hopelessly out of date?” Well, no. Donald Knuth “froze” further development on TeX itself, but people are constantly creating new and better packages for it, and the number of users is huge. As one wit put it, “TeX is a well-kept secret known only to millions.” There’s a large grain of truth in that comment.
Why are these programs so popular? Well, for one thing, they’re almost all free. They’re extremely stable (TeX itself is as bug-free as it’s possible for a program to be.) They’re open source and have a human-readable, nonproprietary file format. They’re well supported, with a large, helpful user base and tons of documentation. And they create world-class typography, with such features as hanging punctuation, margin kerning, automatic footnotes and ligatures, full-paragraph justification (InDesign uses the TeX justification engine), and extremely good hyphenation and page-breaking ability. They also work on PC, Macintosh, Unix, and almost any other platform you can name, with identical results on any system. You’ll find some sample documents here:
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/
http://www.tsengbooks.com/pages/2/index.htm
Why are these programs so unpopular? Because they’re code-driven, batch-processing programs, much like the Penta typesetting system I used back in the 1980s. That means they are *not* interactive WYSIWYG programs like QuarkXPress or InDesign, but you certainly can see the result of your work as you go along, based on the text and codes you’re working with. Actually, working in LaTex is very much like working in the Reveal Codes window in WordPerfect; it’s a way of taking control of what’s going on in your documents. And more control almost always means less ease-of-use.
LaTeX is not really all that hard to use, however. Figuring out *how* to use it, on the other hand, is a real bear. I’m hoping this and my next few articles will ease the task considerably–with an emphasis on using Microsoft Word as a front end to a mostly automated LaTeX typesetting system.
Stay tuned for further development.
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READERS WRITE
Clive Tolley wrote:
Like you I find the existing typesetting programs inadequate. InDesign has a great deal to offer, but having to set hundreds of footnotes manually in frames is daunting. I used Ventura for the last book I did, and despite a lot of positive reviews of the program I have found it an almost complete dead loss, as it is about the most unreliable program I have ever used, with constant break-downs (meaning the file has to be saved after ever single action, to be safe), unreliable features such as the search and replace (which only replaces random instances), claims in the manual which are not fulfilled (such as its inability to import Word documents), and its unreliable treatment of footnotes–it may be the only typesetting program that deals with them at all, but it is not a patch on Word. It is actually quicker to juggle around and overcome the typesetting limitations within Word than it is to contend with constant problems of this sort. I just wish Microsoft would spend a tenth the energy it puts into gimmicks for jazzing up business documents to form a program that would really serve for efficient typesetting–it would not take much.
I will be interested to see how your program flow works. I could never get anywhere with TeX: it just made me feel aggressive and resentful toward the designers of such an impenetrable jungle of a program. I was churning over all the things I was getting annoyed with Ventura for–I reckoned it at least doubled my work time on the previous job. I could make a list a mile long! I have to wonder what the professional reviewers were actually doing with the program–nothing resembling traditional book typesetting, I get the feeling. The lack of support for Unicode is quite ridiculous, so if you want ligatures and such like you have to do something along the lines of making a new font by extracting the characters using Fontographer or the like (my solution). (Fontographer, by the way, is something I wish they would update, though it has served me well for about ten years and still deals with fonts in a way I can use: again, a useful program they obviously think has too small a market to make much money from.)
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Todd A. Manza wrote:
Thanks for the past help all your tools and articles have been to me. Editor’s ToolKit, WordCounter, and especially Puller(!) have allowed me to offer my clients great service and have more than paid for themselves after even a single use. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I’ve gotten together my exclusion dictionary list, and I followed your Editorium instructions for saving and placing it, but it seems not to be working. (Yes, I did close Word after each test.) Microsoft’s online help gives basically the same information as yours; both end with Word 2000, but I wouldn’t think that matters.
After following the instructions and saving as mssp3en.exc in
username\application data\microsoft\proof
and seeing that it didn’t work, I searched my hard drive for the mssp3en.lex file and found it in:
c:\program\common files\microsoft shared\proof.
So I saved my dictionary there, plain text, same routine, just a different location. Thought I was pretty smart, but unfortunately saving the file there didn’t do any good.
Next I tried creating a new custom dictionary through Word’s Options\spelling\custom dictionaries, saving with the same name (mssp3en.exc). I added a couple of words manually and closed out (after checking the box to enable), but even THAT didn’t work.
After none of my efforts (except the last) did any dictionary show up in my list of custom dictionaries.
Any idea what I’m doing wrong? I’ve got American English as the default language and I would think the instructions would be roughly the same as 2000, but it’s just not kicking in.
[Editor’s note: I really didn’t have an answer for Todd, but the next day he solved the problem:]
I wrote to you last night about my exclusion dictionary not working. It seems the problem has solved itself, and my guess is that I had to close ALL Office programs, including Outlook (which was open, of course, when I was writing to you), since the dictionaries are apparently shared.
This morning when I sat down to work, I saw one of my excluded words appear with redline!
I just wanted to let you know (a) so you won’t waste your time trying to answer my question, and (b) so you can pass this tidbit along, if anyone else has the same problem.
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Many thanks to Clive and Todd for their helpful comments.
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RESOURCES
Clive Tolley wrote:
It was interesting to read about InFNotes in the Editorium newsletter. I checked out one or two things, but I thought the program was outrageously priced, and I do not think anything really makes it as easy as Word does.
Do you know the free InDesign footnote macro for Microsoft Word by Guy Verville?
http://www.guyverville.com/scripts.php#InDesign
I had a little go at it, and it is good of him to make it available free, but any extensive footnoting still involves quite a bit of work (and I have only ever done one book without extensive footnotes); however, for those that want to do this in InDesign, this is certainly better value than the commercial products I have seen so far.
Even better would be, in addition, to get Richard O’Regan to have a look at it and compare with InFNotes (whose price is really offputting).
[Editor’s note: Richard, if you’re reading this and want to try it, we’d love to hear about your results. Up to you, of course.]
Again, many thanks to Clive.
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THE FINE PRINT
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